Founding Engineer

Aurea is building the Strava of gaming. Every match a player finishes becomes stats, Records, a highlight and a post, with no effort from the player. We started 2.5 months ago, backed by more than €1.5M, with a team from Medal.tv, Solana and Gamestry. As of October 2026:
• 20k registered players, growing +70% month over month
• 12k monthly active players
• 5.4M matches analysed across League, TFT, VALORANT and CS2
• Players in 94 countries THE ROLE Everything our players see and touch runs on the web, and you will own it end to end, with a direct line to the founders. Our backend team handles game ingestion and the highlights engine. The product surfaces, the rendering strategy and performance are yours.
• Product surfaces: a ranked social feed with video highlights and live streams, profiles, the highlights player, Records and leaderboards, communities and onboarding. Players spend more than 11 minutes per session.
• Performance: make a media-heavy app feel native on a mid-range phone. Own rendering and caching, keep navigations instant and every route under its JS budget. We measure it: real-user Web Vitals by release, INP attribution and a bundle budget in CI.
• Architecture: decide what runs on the server and what runs in the browser, shape the component library with our designer, make testing part of how we work. Review code, mentor and help hire the engineers who come next. WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR
• 5+ years building consumer web products that real people use every day
• You play games. League, VALORANT, CS2, TFT or anything else: you get why players want to show off their stats
• Deep React and Next.js App Router

experience:
Server and Client Components, Suspense and streaming, Server Actions, caching and revalidation
• A performance mindset you can prove with numbers: Core Web Vitals, profiling, bundle analysis, list virtualization, image and video loading on slow mobile networks
• Strong TypeScript
• Comfortable going one layer down: reading a query plan, adding the right index with the backend team
• Daily work with coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex), and opinions about where they help and where they don't
• Product taste: you have opinions about feeds, onboarding and retention
• Founder mentality: ownership, speed, comfortable with ambiguity NICE TO HAVE Social or feed products at scale, video playback on mobile, real-time UIs, experimentation with PostHog, internationalization, open source in the React or Next.js ecosystem, React Native. THE STACK Newest stack, no legacy. Next.js 16 App Router on Vercel with Cache Components, React 19, TypeScript 7, Tailwind 4, shadcn/ui, TanStack Query and Virtual, Prisma 7 on PlanetScale Postgres, Better Auth, PostHog, Sentry, Knock. No Redux, no pages router, no migration backlog.

WHAT WE OFFER
• Competitive salary and meaningful equity as a founding engineer
• Real ownership: your decisions shape the product, the team and the company from day one
• Barcelona office Monday to Thursday, with a team of gamers building what they want to use HIRING PROCESS 1. First chat with a founder 2. Technical interview: frontend architecture and product 3. Technical challenge: build a small Aurea feature 4. Final interview: meet the team, and offer

HOW TO APPLY
Apply here, or send your GitHub, portfolio or the best thing you have shipped to pol@aurea.gg. Tell us your main game and peak rank, and one performance problem you solved, with the numbers.